Remember that case where a high school in Ohio grudgingly decided to remove a Jesus portrait that was in the hallway under threat of a federal lawsuit that it violated the Establishment Clause? [Read more…]
Scientist Ed Stone of CalTech and formerly of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory explains the significance of the Voyager mission that was blasted off in 1977 for what was hoped to be at least a four year mission that would be able to photograph two out the outer planets (Jupiter and Saturn) but is still going strong nearly four decades later, passing Neptune and Uranus and has just almost left the solar system and entered interstellar space, and is still sending back information. [Read more…]
Nelson Mandela died today. There is not much that I can add to all the words that will be written about him. But I thought that this old TV interview from 1961, when he was in hiding and before he was captured by the apartheid South African government and put in prison for 27 years before being released in 1990, was interesting. [Read more…]
Jesus and Mo have figured it out.
I wrote earlier about the puzzling insistence of the Republican party pursuing policies on birth control that are guaranteed to alienate women. Jonathan Capehart describes how they seem to be deliberately pursuing policies that alienate African Americans and Latinos as well. [Read more…]
Physics tends to be highly under-represented when it comes to women, with them comprising only 13% of faculty in degree-granting institutions. There are many suggested reasons for this but one heartening sign is that physics department faculty and professional organizations have recognized that this deficit does not reflect well on us and have made concerted efforts to increase interest in physics among young girls and to encourage more women to major in the subject and to pursue it as a career. [Read more…]
In a shrewd marketing move just before the Thanksgiving shopping madness, Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos managed to grab headlines for his company by telling an awestruck and gullible Charlie Rose on 60 Minutes that it may not be long before his company was delivering packages to customers in 30 minutes using drones. [Read more…]
It is quite amazing how casually some Americans can talk about using nuclear weapons against Iran, given what we know about the long-term, drastic, and indiscriminate effects of such weapons. Usually they shy away from saying so directly and couch it in terms of saying that “all options are on the table” or “no options are off the table”. [Read more…]
When I think of the Antarctic at all, I just think of it as this huge inert unpopulated continent that is permanently covered with ice. What I had not realized is that in places the ice covering is as much as two miles thick and that the continent contains about 50% of the world’s supply of fresh water. The ice sheet is also not static but dynamic, with complex flow patterns. [Read more…]
I start each day with a cup of coffee. I have done so since I became a teenager because children drinking coffee was not as uncommon in Sri Lanka as it is in the US. While I like coffee, I don’t drink a lot, with at most one other cup during the day, usually in the afternoon, with an after dinner cup of tea. But despite my fondness for the beverage, I am definitely not a coffee connoisseur. I drink instant coffee and add milk and sugar to it, a practice that is scorned by the purists. [Read more…]